Jurors Describe Tearful Decision in McVeigh Case

DENVER — They took only two votes--first to find Timothy J. McVeigh guilty; later to sentence him to death. But it was the first vote that unleashed their emotions, and when they were done, all 12 of his jurors bowed their heads and cried.

“Have you ever seen 12 people cry?” juror Ruth Meier asked Saturday. “Well, we were 12 people who cried. We cried when we pronounced him guilty. And then it took us a good hour or an hour and a half to calm ourselves down to go back inside the courtroom.”

Meier said she also prayed for McVeigh, a young, decorated Army soldier whose parents begged the jurors to spare his life. She was mindful that she had lost her own son to cancer. “There were real tears,” she said. “Every single one of us.”

Meier and 10 other members of the panel (juror David Gilger was reportedly traveling to be a guest on a TV news program) talked to reporters at an impromptu news conference, telling them of their feelings about what brought them to their particular place in history.

For seven weeks they sat in silence in a Denver courtroom. Then they met in secret. And finally they decided unanimously to shed more blood to atone for the tremendous loss of life from a truck bomb explosion two years ago at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In reaching a sentence of death for McVeigh, many of the jurors said they wanted to make sure they could muster the courage to tell him of the importance of their decision.

“I wanted to be able to look him straight in the eyes and tell him he was going to be executed,” said jury foreman James Osgood, a marketing manager and son of a career Air Force veteran.

“I was just one of the 12, and I wanted him to know that I was sincere and that I was resolved and that I was committed in my verdict,” Osgood said.

Mike Leeper, a Navy veteran from the Vietnam War, said all of his colleagues wanted to return solemnly to the courtroom and face McVeigh in unison.

“We talked about it prior to going out there in the courtroom,” he said. “This was the ultimate challenge. This was part of our judicial system. This is part of what it’s all about.

“You have to be able to look a person right in the face and tell him, ‘This is what we have decided,’ and then without a doubt to be able to walk away with that decision.”

Soon the jurors will return to their normal lives.

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Tonya Stedman is a waitress who lives with her boyfriend and reads Glamour magazine. Diane Faircloth works part time as a registered nurse, coordinating job training services for the disabled. Her daughter helped collect pennies in grade school to send to the Oklahoma City bombing victims.

Fred Clarke is retired from the Air Force. He likes to listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. He sometimes believes--like McVeigh--that the federal government should be smaller.

As their separate lives begin to spin slowly back into routine, they said they still have some lingering questions. What haunts them most about McVeigh are these: Why did he do it? Why does he to this day show no feeling or remorse.

“Why? Why? That’s still what we don’t know,” Leeper said.

“He was stoic,” said Martha Hite, a teacher’s assistant in the public school system here. “He never showed much emotion.”

Still, Hite found a peculiar bond between her and the man she later judged as the worst mass murderer in American history. “He made eye contact with me almost every day. One day he knew I was going to my son’s graduation and he looked at his watch and nodded to make sure I was going to make it.”

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In weighing the evidence, the jurors said they felt they could not help but side with the government. They were even able to overlook the fact that the government did not show any evidence of how the ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb was assembled.

“The bomb was made of simple elements,” said Brown, another Navy veteran.

“So it’s reasonable to assume that the information on how to do it is out there. Anybody could do it. And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to put this bomb together,” said Brown, who suffers from diabetes as well as a hearing loss. He attributes the latter to attending too many Grateful Dead concerts.

The jurors said they doubted the defense theory that McVeigh’s rage against the government was born after the deaths of some 80 religious cultists during an FBI raid in Waco, Texas.

“There’s no justification for his actions,” Stedman said. “And there’s been no responsibility on his part either. But for the defense attorneys, what else did they have to work with?”

Jurors also discounted the defense argument that a life sentence for McVeigh would keep him from becoming a political martyr to other far-right extremists, and that it actually might prevent other terrorist attacks.

“We were judging Timothy McVeigh,” Leeper said. “We weren’t judging the future.”

Also not considered was the line in the federal grand jury indictment against McVeigh that suggested that “others unknown” were also involved in the bombing.

“That doesn’t matter in relation to McVeigh,” Osgood said.

McVeigh remained silent throughout the trial, just as he largely has since his arrest two days after the bombing.

Said Meier: “I would have liked to have heard from McVeigh. I would have liked to have known why he changed.”

But Leeper said: “I don’t think it would have made any difference. Not from what we saw.”

As the jurors reflected on the trial, McVeigh, 29, was reportedly moved Saturday to an undisclosed prison.

The jurors did have trouble believing Michael Fortier, McVeigh’s former Army buddy who turned into a government witness and testified against McVeigh in exchange for a lenient sentence on charges connected to his prior knowledge of the bombing.

“We looked at his testimony but I don’t think anyone was relying totally on it,” said Jon Candelaria, a local landscape worker with a long black ponytail.

“We used his testimony to fill in some of the gaps we needed. But there were other problems.”

But Meier said the Fortier problem was easily overcome because there was so much other evidence available from the government’s case--the largest FBI investigation in the bureau’s history.

“We went over the evidence piece by piece,” she said. “We read papers. We handled the evidence. And the more we handled it the more we became convinced that we had to come up with a guilty verdict.”